‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’ Review: Documentary Celebrates Troubled Rock Icon

thewrap.com:

EMBARGOED UNTIL 9:40PM PT THURSDAYMost documentaries about pioneering musicians are celebrations that exhibit the performer’s greatness right off the bat through electric concert footage and testimonials.

Lisa Cortés’ “Little Richard: I Am Everything” does that, of course, with Little Richard ripping it up onstage and on screen, and Mick Jagger, Tom Jones, and John Waters testifying to his power. “He’s everything,” says Mick, in the first of a few nods to the film’s title.But “Little Richard: I Am Everything” does something else: It gets complicated right off the bat.

As part of the opening sequence, we see footage in which latter-day Little Richard tells David Letterman that he came out as gay early in his life, “but God made me know that he made Adam to be with Eve, not Steve.”That’s the first hint that there’s a thorny side to this rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, a flamboyant showman who came out of Macon, Georgia promising release and freedom as he shouted “a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” He wasn’t the only early rocker to be tortured by thoughts that he was playing the devil’s music, but his status as a gay icon hardly sits comfortably with the way he dismissed that status on and off throughout his life.So while there’s plenty of celebration in “I Am Everything,” it’s more textured and troubled than that; it’s a doc that loves its subject without denying his messy contradictions.

But what would you expect? As told by friends, fans, family, and by Little Richard himself via a number of different recordings and interviews (including one with Donny and Marie Osmond), the story is an odd one.